[Andrej]

This is a new phenomenon that's happening with my iMac G5 that's driving me absolutely insane. Yesterday, I was doing my usual Finder browsing, and for just a second, all screen text, window borders, menu bar text, and even the Dock outline became slightly blurred, particularly just horizontally off from the middle of the screen. But that went away instantly.

Today, I logged into my computer to find that the display is permanently like this! (Take a screenshot of your computer, open it in Photoshop, and apply a blur with a 30% Fade. That's how it looks.)

I haven't changed my monitor settings, I'm using 1440 x 900 (the highest res. on a 17" iMac G5), I still have millions of colors, and in the Appearance pane, I still have Automatic for the font smoothing style.

I've tried changing the font smoothing style to various different options and then logged out and back in, but that did not work. I've tried switching monitor resolutions, but that did not work.

Finally, this now permanent problem does not occur until after the login screen and just before all items on my menu bar have loaded.

What the hell is going on?! This is driving me crazy.


Edit: When I select text and scroll down (click and drag), the display's bottom jumps a pixel up and down per press and release of the mouse button, and the rest of the display reacts to the stretch. WTF?!

[JKT]

It sounds like you have magnified your screen ever so slightly (System Preferences>Universal Access>Seeing, Zoom settings). Press command-option plus and minus to see it in action (plus magnifies, - shrinks).

[Andrej]

Alright, that fixed the problem, but I never even use Universal access, which is really strange. I was ****ing my pants thinking that I was about to cough up $995 for a logic board repair, in which case I would have had a decent excuse to go Intel. LOL.

[JKT]

You probably accidentally activated it (command-option-8), but glad it is the problem and not a hardware issue.